D&D 5E Enhancing "Rise of Tiamat" (Practical stuff to try at your table!)

jayoungr · Dec 11, 2018

Parking a quote from another thread with a useful link:

MichaelArkAngel said:
I have a ton of maps I made for this campaign, and have them uploaded on DeviantArt.com, FREE for download. If you think you could use them, feel free to download at your leisure!!!

https://www.deviantart.com/michaelarkangel/gallery/

The gallery has maps for HotDQ and RoT, as well as several other adventures.

Anthony Winter · Jan 14, 2019

GuardianLurker said:
[h1]Devilish Demands[/h1]

[h2]Accepting Lord Volmer's Offer[/h2]
The trove Volmer is revealing is a real one. It is also one that the Celestials were intending for a later use. It is a relatively minor cache, and Lord Volmer intends to distribute the items to good-aligned people, so none of the normal celestial responses will be triggered. It will, however, deprive the intended users of easily accessed resources. It also establishes Lord Volmer as a reliable source of information for the greedy adventurers that might seek him out.

Getting to the trove will be easy for the characters. The high levels of Undermountain have been cleared enough that there are few monsters left, and the ones that are are wise enough to leave adventures of the characters' level alone.

Ok so my group is around half way through Rise of Tiamat.
They have sorted out Varam, driven off Neronvain, killed Chuth, recused five young metallic dragons from near the well and there have been two assassination attempts.
They currently have sidestepped into stormkings thunder and will try to resuce King Hekaton in order to unite adn secure Giant support.
I have made Imyrith Male adn one of Tiamat's current consorts (in waiting).

The group met with Lord Volmer early but went on to other quests. Now that mag mage is out what level shoudl I put the cache on. I am thinking of Terminus and having a relationship between the planetar there and the cache.

Any ideas?

Anthony Winter · Feb 26, 2019

Hi,

Our party is 14th level and has already got both the dragons and Giants on side. Armies of the west are marching down the trade way about 50 days from the well of dragons.
Does anyone have ideas that I could present to the PCs that arent just side quests as it wont fit logically for them to go gallivanting off while the rest of the world are marching to war.

If there is a published module I can tweak to slot in that woudl be ideal. something to get them for 14th to 16th in time for the main assault on the temple.

jayoungr · Feb 26, 2019

Anthony Winter said:
If there is a published module I can tweak to slot in that woudl be ideal. something to get them for 14th to 16th in time for the main assault on the temple.

Why not check out Palace of the Red Pasha?

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/180659/DMs-Kit-Palace-of-the-Red-Pasha?filters=0_0_0_0_0_45462_0_0

It's designed for slightly higher level characters, since it's intended as a follow-up to Rise of Tiamat, but it should be easy to scale back. (And actually, my group did this adventure at level 14, but they were pretty well optimized and had some magic items.) The storyline involves tracking down Severin's second-in-command and taking out a major Cult of the Dragon training ground and source of reinforcements.

The one tricky bit is that it takes place in Calimshan; you'll probably want to make a teleportation circle available to the PCs for transportation if you do this.

akr71 · Feb 26, 2019

^ or a Helm of Teleportation.

I borrowed heavily from Storm Kings Thunder around level 14. I really didn't like the whole Cloud Giant working for the Dragons thing in HotDQ, so I had Iymrith guilty of orchestrating Blagothkus' downfall.

The short version - after finding out that an ancient blue dragon was responsible for the turmoil among the giants, they traveled to her lair in Anauroch to kill her. This was all in the hopes of bringing the giants into the alliance and the final battle.

GuardianLurker · May 31, 2019

Surprise all! Not dead! But yes, it was a very harsh few years between then and now.

Anyway - *my* players are finally (!) getting to the point where Tiamat is viewable in the near term future. They've already voted to continue down into Avernus, so I'm looking forward to using Mordenkainen's.

Which means I've been reviewing my notes for the upcoming battle. And in the process, I've discovered that I've misplaced the modified Battlemap images (to match my write-up). Does anyone have a copy?

P.S. If you haven't gotten there yet, I've a few more interludes to post, as well as my replacement for the Mission to Thay.

GuardianLurker · May 31, 2019

Well, since I wrote up that little bit long before Mad Mage came out, any where at all works equally well. Ideally, it should be tucked in a little out-of-the-way corner.

When I ran it with my group, I didn't want to get sidetracked, so I left it's actual location more than a little nebulous. "After descending through the Entrance Pit in the Yawning Portal, you follow Volmer's directions to a small, dirt-encrusted alcove. You're sure this is the right one, but there's no door visible. What do you do?" is almost word-for-word. After all, this was just supposed to be a quick side quest.

jayoungr · May 31, 2019

OMG, Guardian! You're back!! Is that really you?

GuardianLurker · May 31, 2019

jayoungr said:
OMG, Guardian! You're back!! Is that really you?

Yep! Hard to explain, 'cause *I'm* still not certain how things ended up in that fraying handbasket, but I can certainly vouch for its destination. Very, very, very, ..... glad that's over with.

So yes, I'm back!

GuardianLurker · Jun 4, 2019

Replacing Mission to Thay

Hi again all!

So, Mission to Thay suffers from a number of problems in my opinion. In no particular order:

The entire episode boils down to two rolls per player. There's no inherent tension/conflict, just a a series of rolls (i.e. a skill challenge), and with very little at risk.
Unless the players are familiar with Faerun already, they'll have no real idea who the Red Wizards are, or why Thay is scary.
For that matter, Red Wizards (een if they're rebels, but still evil) are members of the opposition. Why ask them for help?
Also, if its to give the Alliance/Players sufficient background wizardly help, why go all the way to Thay? The players already have an in with the Arcane Brotherhood through the resuce of Maccath.
It's short an under-detailed, leaving the GM having to "wing it" in response to the adventure, instead of the players' actions.

Its one (very small) saving grace is that it's SHORT, and thus doesn't interrupt the adventure's pacing. It's also VERY role-play heavy, which is great if your group enjoys it, but my group leans heavily towards combat bunnies.

Travel Times
[sblock]If you haven't already run this section, don't forget the Travel Times for the armies. By my estimate, there's roughly 21 days of travel from Triel (the most likely assembly point) and the Well of Dragons. Then there's all the travel for the armies to get *to* Triel. If you read closely, its apparent that the campaign is supposed to take significant game world time. Running the calculations drives home that it's most likely *months* between council sessions. [/sblock]

One final thing before I start the posts - my group has a lot of very experienced players, most of them are combat bunnies, and we have a few very, very, good tacticians. As a result, my defaut difficulty setting is *much, much* harder than 5e's. The group (a Warlock 15, Cleric 14, Monk 13, Rogue 13, Sorcerer 13) dealt with what I would consider a Very Difficult, possibly Deadly encounter. It was a CR 24 encounter. Depending on your group, you will want to revise the encounters, probably quite heavily.

Also, I made extensive use of Matt Woodfill's Elementals Expanded, Greater Elementals, Lesser Elementals, and Elemental Myrmidons. All are available throught the DM's Guild, and I recommend them highly.